The plague of cinematic universes
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Look. I’m aware that film-making is a business. I’m also aware that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now the highest grossing movie franchise of all time by a long shot. All I’m asking is: what happened to the practice of hiding the cynical capital-driven machine of Hollywood behind a curtain of magic and wonder? For heaven’s sake, the Wizard of Oz knew this and he was written in 1900.
With Jared Leto and Johnny Depp still working, it shouldn’t come across lightly when I say that every studio’s push for their own cinematic universes is the single worst plague on the quality of Hollywood’s output at present.
Ground zero was the release of Iron Man (2008). Since then, Marvel has transformed a group of B-list superheroes into box-office juggernauts (I mean, seriously, Thor: Ragnarok stands to be my favourite movie this year so far… fricking Thor). And with four of their films included in the top twenty highest grossing of all time, every rival studio woke up bleary-eyed and desperately attempted to cobble together a universe from whatever scraps they could find down the back of the sofa.
Nearly a decade on though, it’s very clear that this has nothing but a detrimental effect on the landscape of film. With every big-budget blockbuster at least partly focused on shoehorning in a continuity between separate installations in a planned colossal narrative, comparatively little thought appears to go into writing an engaging individual story. It ends up feeling like we go into the cinema, watch 20 minutes of three-minute trailers and then one two-hour trailer.
With this in mind, I felt it may be fun to perform a discursive autopsy on each of the MCU imitation attempts (in short, this was intended as a single article but the word count became obscene so I guess it’s a series now). What fun.